A plodding look at the many views of this enduring moralist.
A determined yet not exactly fresh look at this “hopelessly authoritarian, misogynistic, and conservative” sage, whose ideas have nonetheless endured and thrived in East Asia.
Time journalist Schuman (The Miracle: The Epic Story of Asia’s Quest for Wealth, 2009) finds plenty of intriguing contradictions in the ideas of Confucius (551-479 B.C.), which were largely spread by his ardent followers in the fragmented Analects and other works. The primacy of education, the uses of meritocracy, the sanctity of the filial bond, the subservience of women, the harmonizing sense of knowing one’s place in society—these are some of the salient Confucian tenets. Schuman is not a scholar, and while he infuses his work with historical research, he remains rooted in the present day, seeking clues as to why Confucian ideas were both excoriated by the Chinese (during Mao Zedong’s era) and rehabilitated as a useful ploy for increasing productivity and prosperity in the workforce (since Deng Xiaoping’s era). To reflect the diversity of reception to Confucius’ ideas over the ages, the author divides his chapters by facets through which to view the enigmatic moralist: Confucius the Man, Confucius the Oppressor, Confucius the Businessman and so on. In his own time of squabbling kingdoms, Confucius proposed a revolutionary way of nation-building—not by armies but by benevolence. In language that is often dull and consistently injected with business terminology, Schuman looks at the spread of the sage’s ideas through East Asia, especially the adoption of his teachings by the Han political leadership. Yet by the 19th century, a once-great China had fallen well behind the West. Moreover, while the Communists executed a thorough rejection of Confucian ideas, the modern regimes of China, Singapore and others are keen to resurrect Confucian ideas for economic management.
A plodding look at the many views of this enduring moralist.Pub Date: March 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-465-02551-0
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Basic Books
Review Posted Online: Nov. 28, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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